How to Get Those Creative Juices Flowing – Top Tip No 10

I was only thinking the other day about what do you do when you’re just not feeling that creative? What are some of the ideas that I can give you to go out and try to get your creative juices flowing?

Well, over the weekend I was in Birmingham, doing some street photography. I was trying out this lens, which is the Olympus 17mm, which is a 35mm equivalent. It’s an f 1.8 lens. So it’s nice and fast. It’s nice compact. It’s a great lens for street photography. It’s quite unobtrusive. People don’t see you sticking a massive, great lens in their faces.

So I’m out taking pictures with this, and I was down by the Bullring. Now if you don’t know the Bullring, it’s a shopping area in Birmingham. And between the two halves of the Bullring is this huge bronze bull that’s been cast and put there as a statue, and it’s quite dramatic. So I was there watching all the tourists having their photos taken or taking selfies and this sort of thing. And I thought there is a bit of a project I can do here, to do some creative stuff.

I’ve got my fixed focal length lens, which encourages you to walk around and move and compose your shot, which a zoom lens doesn’t, because you can just stand in one place and zoom in and out. So first thing is, when I’m thinking about improving my creativity, get a fixed focal length lens. And then I just wander around my subject, taking shots from different angles, watching what’s going on, and generally see what I can get. Now it doesn’t always work. Sometimes you get a good shot, sometimes you don’t. But let’s have a look at the few of the shots that I got, some of which worked and some of which haven’t.

This is one I quite like, this shot. We’ve got these three guys taking a selfie here. You’ve got the bull in the background, and you’ve got this little kid here, which adds a little bit of interest to the picture as he’s looking under what’s going on there.

Now again, capturing the right moment is critical and I’ve just been a fractional late here. They’ve taken their picture, the girl here is now no longer looking at the camera, the guy has starting to walk off. The lady who’s taking the photo is starting to walk off. So a fraction earlier, that would have been great, but I just didn’t get the timing right.

Sometimes it’s just a question of waiting for a group to arrange themselves. So here I quite like this because you’ve got the lady with the camera, the camera phone here. But one lady here is looking somewhere else and it doesn’t work quite as well.

And so I waited a moment. I’ve also moved my angle. You’ll see I’ve got down a bit lower, and I moved a little bit to the right, and then we’ve got the girl here with a camera taking a picture of the three of them. They’re all looking at the camera. And that one works quite nicely. The bull here looking right at me rather menacingly.

Here again, a little boy having his photo taken by his mom, and we’ve got the bull. I’ve moved in a bit closer, got in a bit lower. The 35mm lens tends to give you these sort of dramatic shots and enlarge things in the foreground, so that’s why the bull is quite dramatic there.

This is my favourite of the ones that I took. You’ve got a few people in the background, to show it’s a busy area. The bull’s very dramatic. I like the way this girl is leaning back, so you’ve got a lead line coming in up her leg, you’ve got to lead line going in along her arm. It’s very obvious what they’re doing. And for me that was the best one of the bunch. Often, when I’m doing these sort of things, you may only get one or two shots that you really like.

So that’s what I do. A fixed focal length, get a subject. And most towns have got something where the tourist go and have their pictures taken. It might be the Town Hall, it might be a statue like this. If you go to Stratford on Avon, you’ve got statues of Shakespeare and things like that. It might be an opera house, it might be whatever. But you’ll find a place where the tourists are congregating and there are loads of them milling around having their pictures taken, either doing the selfie thing or whatever. You have to be a bit patient. You have to keep trying, working at it. But it encourages you to think, and you’ll get something a bit different. So have fun with that. Take a few photos, post them down below, share your result. I’ll look forward to seeing them.